One of the major objectives of digital marketing is connecting with audience and expanding reach of marketing campaigns. But, does content only indicate text? Well, of course not, it is an umbrella term as there are different forms and types of content. For any successful content marketing campaign, you need to strike balance between different forms of content. Also, you need to create and update content regularly and be creative in your approach. Create the same form and tone of content over and over again won’t stimulate prospects of success and make the entire campaign boring.

To make sure your content marketing campaign stands out from competitors, you need to integrate other content forms with blogging. Here are different forms of content you must try –

·         Videos – With content efforts going social and popularity of videos among online audience, content marketers are slowing releasing potential held by videos. From tutorials to how-to topics, videos are great way of providing valuable and informative content.

·         Infographics – One of the best ways to present information in precise way, infographics presents information or data in a visually appealing manner. One of the prime benefits of infographics is that it can be shared hence their social value is high.

·         Memes – Easy to make, hilarious and power to go viral, memes is a great way of capturing attention of your audience. Memes need to be witty and strike a chord with your audience. As they are adaptable, you can develop memes across different niche and topics.

·         Presentations – When you wish to describe an idea in detail, you can create presentations. As presentations allow integrating text with images and other media, you can be creative, innovative and think out-of-the-box to explain your ideas.

For content marketing, you need to keep experimenting with different forms of content instead of following a standard format. Remember, the key is to develop connect with your audience.

Analytic tools provide an insight into the technical performance of a website and help in bringing improvements to the website. But merely setting up analytics on the website does not guarantee success as you should be able to make proper interpretations from the available data. It has been seen that businesses set up analytics but fail to dig and utilize information provided by the tool. Also, analytics tools like Google Analytics provide insight into technical performance of the website, but to measure effectiveness of the marketing campaigns, marketers need to analyze the metrics properly.

Here are few key metric provided that by Google Analytics that every business must watch out for –

• Content – This metric allows you to analyze which content on your website is popular with the visitors. Once you get an idea of what content your visitors like to read, you can develop more effective content strategy and improve content on other pages of the website. Content has the power of developing strong user engagement hence this metrics should not be overlooked.
• Organic Search Traffic – In the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics dashboard, you get an insight into whether your traffic is from organic search, paid campaign or direct type in. You should focus on Organic Search traffic as it will give you an idea of the keyword phrases that brought visitors to your website. Increasing organic visitors is a great way of increasing traffic to a website without increasing your paid advertising.
• Bounce Rate – Businesses should focus on retaining visitors to their website, and keeping them engaged. Hence, Bounce Rate metric is very important. Bounce rate of a web page gives percentage of users who left immediately after landing on that particular web page. If the bounce rate of a page is high, it indicates that the web page does not offer what visitors are looking for. So, you need to optimize content for that web page.
• Exit Pages – Just like the landing pages of visitors are important to know from where visitors are entering your website, you also need to know the pages from where visitors are leaving the website. So, you should watch out for the Exit Pages metric. If the visitors are exiting from the Thank You or Order completion pages, it means those visitors were converted to customers. If visitors exit from any other page, it indicates that you need to optimize those pages.

Google Analytics metrics and reports are very important for businesses. So, they should have sound understanding of these metrics and how they can be improved. 

For every business, acquiring and retaining customers is of utmost importance. With marketing techniques going digital, competition in the market has become intense. Businesses can take advantage of digital analytic tools and platforms to get better understanding of their audience. Small businesses can use powerful digital tools like Google Analytics as their software for web metrics and utilize its information to create rewarding marketing campaigns. Though Google Analytics is one of the leading tools to measure performance of a website, small businesses are apprehensive for using it. 

Google Analytics is not as intimidating as it seems, only businesses need to know what they want and make proper interpretation of the information. 

Here are few tips for small businesses to get started with Google Analytics -

• There are several metrics available in Google Analytics, but you should focus on actionable data. You should concentrate on reports like Organic Search, Referrals and All Traffic and others to optimize your marketing methods.
• Improve the Search functionality of your website. With Site Search, you will be able to get a better idea of performance of your internal site search and what visitors are looking for on your website.
• Use Page Views to get an idea of the popular pages of your website. When a particular webpage is more popular than others, you should emphasize on keeping that page in excellent condition, updating the content regularly and improving its performance.
• Create realistic business goals to track key indicators like number of leads, e-commerce transactions, cost per lead and others. If you do not have an e-commerce website or take payments online, set goals for number of people signing up or filling Contact Us forms. Your website should have at least 1 goal.
• Analytics reports are a powerful tool for actionable intelligence, so do not ignore the reports. Generate custom reports, and compare them to conversion data. It will help you to refine and optimize your campaigns.

Even if your business does not have an analyst or expert in digital marketing, you can utilize Google Analytics to benefit your business. By spending little time on Google Analytics, small businesses can analyze how their marketing efforts are paying off.

With the rising popularity of blogging, more and more businesses and marketers are trying to leverage the potential held by blogging. For any blog to be successful, it is very important that the blog reaches relevant and wide audience base. So, every blogger must know importance of blog optimization and need of SEO to boost their presence online. If done right, SEO can make significant contribution to visitors and increase engagement of the blog.

Every blogger needs to know following SEO tips for optimizing experience of their blog –

·       Blog titles should be clear, precise and relevant to traffic. While giving titles to the blogs, think over phrases and search terms that users would enter in the search engine while looking for information. Try to incorporate these keywords and phrases in your title.

·     Update your blog at least 3-4 times a week. One of factors on which search engines rank your website is its frequency of update.

·        Create a schedule of your blog posts. Create a list of blog topics and keywords you wish to focus on. Look for specific as well as generic keywords that you wish to rank for in the search engine. Maintain keyword density throughout the website.

·     Format and customize URL of the post. Make sure the URLs are user-friendly and meaningful instead of random alphabets and numbers. You can also add keywords to your titles to make them SEO-friendly.

·    Add internal links to your blogs. Linking is not only good for SEO, but it also a great way to reduce bounce rate of the site. By internal linking, you can direct visitors to other blogs relevant to their interest.

·        Add relevant images to the blog. For each image, give appropriate alternative text. You can easily add keywords to the alternative text. Effective use of images can bring significant traffic to the website. Use descriptive words for the image file name.

·       Look for broken links and clean them up. Also ensure that the website navigation works smoothly.

·     Focus on the loading time of your blog as even search engines value blogs that load fast. Avoid unwanted plug-ins and Flash-based modules on the blog as they hamper loading speed.

Blog optimization is very important! Don’t worry! SEO is not too technical, just understand the basics and start optimizing your blog!